Breaking the chains, winning the games, and saving Western Civilization.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Agree and amplify: Swedish version

A study points to what may be a unexpected means of moving women out of the workforce and back into child-rearing: give the feminists what they want with regards to generous maternal leave.

On the surface, Sweden appears to be a feminist paradise. Look at any
global survey of gender equity and Sweden will be near the top.
Family-friendly policies are its norm — with 16 months of paid parental
leave, special protections for part-time workers, and state-subsidized
preschools where, according to a government website, “gender-awareness
education is increasingly common.” Due to an unofficial quota system,
women hold 45 percent of positions in the Swedish parliament. They have
enjoyed the protection of government agencies with titles like the
Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality and the Secretariat of
Gender Research. So why are American women so far ahead of their Swedish
counterparts in breaking through the glass ceiling?

Generous parental leave policies and readily available part-time options have unintended consequences: instead of strengthening women’s attachment to the workplace, they appear to weaken it. In addition to a 16-month leave, a Swedish parent has the right to work six hours a day (for a reduced salary) until his or her child is eight years old. Mothers are far more likely than fathers to take advantage of this law. But extended leaves and part-time employment are known to be harmful to careers — for both genders. And with women a second factor comes into play: most seem to enjoy the flex-time arrangement (once known as the “mommy track”) and never find their way back to full-time or high-level employment. In sum: generous family-friendly policies do keep more women in the labor market, but they also tend to diminish their careers.

According to Blau and Kahn, Swedish-style paternal leave policies and flex-time arrangements pose a second threat to women’s progress: they make employers wary of hiring women for full-time positions at all. Offering a job to a man is the safer bet. He is far less likely to take a year of parental leave and then return on a reduced work schedule for the next eight years.

Regardless of what they say, and no matter what their educational level, most women vastly prefer raising children to nearly any other occupation. That's why the most popular professional occupations for women either involve actual child-rearing activities such as teaching and day care or ersatz ones such as social work, human resources, and middle management.

The reason they choose work over home life is because work pays better. So, the answer is obvious: provide financial incentives to get them on the Mommy track. It may seem unfair - actually, it is unfair - but fairness is a small price to pay for societal sustainability.

24 comments:

Dan in Tx
said...

"According to Blau and Kahn, Swedish-style paternal leave policies and flex-time arrangements pose a second threat to women’s progress...."

The foolishness of academics is so mind boggling that for a plain ol' country boy like myself, I can't help but sometimes think that maybe I'm missing something. They can't really be that stupid can they? I look around and observe things such as: Women's progress is always defined in terms of slaving away in a cubicle somewhere, moving papers around and entering data in a computer that no one will ever look at. It's not like ensuring the continuation of society via the next generation could have any importance. Then we have the case of the guy you posted about over on VP who thinks we could learn so much from tribesmen in mud huts. Oh, let's not forget the likes of Krugman who think that if you have a debt problem, you can somehow borrow and print your way to prosperity because you know, no one has ever been as intelligent as they so surely it has never been tried before. Never mind that if you've ever managed a family budget you know that you can't Visa card yourself to prosperity. What is it that causes such a blaring combination of foolishness, pride and arrogance in these people and why are they always lauded as great thinkers in our society? When I read this sort of thing I can't help but think how much more preferable it would be to be ruled by a wise King than live in a secularist democracy.

One of the strangest experiences I repeatedly had back when I still believed the equality propaganda was the differences in desire to have children between the sexes. Before the age of 14-15 no women would ever say that they wanted children, most would actively go out of their way to say that they did not ever want children. But after that point I started to come across women that not only wanted to have children a very large part of their daydreaming and views of the future was wrapped up in this image. The odd thing about this was off course that very few (I have yet to meet one) men ever really mention children in any way before they have one, they simply don't appear to care.

Typically what happens in sweden when a couple has children is that the mother goes on payed vacation for about a year and then gradually goes back to work and every once in a while a man takes a few months off work as well. I think it should tell you something about your worth at your place of work if you can simply dissapear for a year without anyone protesting...

Daycare for the children here in sweden are also payed for by the government so parents always tend to commute first to a daycare facility and then to work. Looking back at who my teachers were at daycare and school (pre university) the vast majority were women (and they were useless at teaching things).

Too optimistic. What is more likely to happen is government intervention to force employers to hire even 9-months pregnant women and give them promotions during maternity leave. Wouldn't be surprising if Sweden implemented even more radical solutions like forced paternity leave/termination, in-office nurseries or some kind of collectivized child-rearing.

Let's go back to more primitive societies, or even back only as far as the family farm in an agrarian society.

In the context of Proverbs 31, the woman of the house was truly a "first-mate", with many managerial responsibilities and duties.

The modern workplace and modern housekeeping conveniences brought luxury, and with it - boredom.

The extra idleness of the typical housewife was fertile soil for feminist agitators.

In primitive societies, or in early American farming, the man had no apparently privileges of the workplace for woman to feel envious of. She was mending socks, but he was plowing a field or fixing a fence. He was having an "exciting professional career".

When the men began to enter the modern workplace, women were left at home all day, aided by modern conveniences, and with public school having taken their children away from them for several hours, they were actually deprived of meaningful things to occupy their time.

Feminism is the rebellion of the children of luxury, much like other types of white-guilt leftism.

Feminism is really nothing more than an accident of the transition to modernity.

It will pass, because modernity is still very new to human beings, on an anthropological scale.

Herd-enforcement among women is the primary thing that keeps them from acting in their best interests.

Once the meme was established men had it "so good" in the workplace(apex fallacy), and once the seed was planted in the bored housewives' minds, it was only a matter of time until the herd-enforcement pressure was redirected from enforcing good-wife-and-mother into you-can-have-it-all you-go-girlism.

The pioneer woman had it better, in many ways, because she was not subjected to the appearance/illusion of unlimited life choice options, which are like meth to a girl's hypergamous instincts and acquisitive drives.

I think Rollo touched on this point, but the REAL female imperative is safety and provisioning for herself and her children.

What we in the manosphere refer to as the female imperative is nothing more than the current flavor of the core imperative.

I don't really think that women, at their core, are inherently tuned to think and act like the man-hating feminists have trained them.

They are analogous to the butthurt gamma male who uses "nice guy game". He is doing what he thinks will work, what he thinks should work, and gets more enraged by the minute when it produces results opposite to his desires.

To put the genie back in the bottle, men must be willing to do without these perceived benefits and screen out women who 1) have sex outside marriage, and 2) who express (or demonstrate) career-aspiration or economic independence.

This was also a problem in Israel a decade or two back. But you don't want the money to go to just ANYBODY who is willing to make a baby.

The Knesset was trying to find a way to make sure Jewish mothers got the welfare money and Christian and Muslim mothers did not.

Some of the regulations the Knesset was considering were a graduated benefit scale that would give big benefits only to women with more than 4 or 5 kids.

The black hat Jews squirt out 8-12 kids each, so limited benefits for people with only a few kids (or, rather, lots of money for huge families) would prevent most goyim from getting baby money.

We face a similar problem in America. How do you make sure you fund the babies you WANT to have, and not subsidize The Other? Somalis living in America, for example, would gladly have 6, 8, 10 kids per mother.

And (perhaps more importantly, as the Jews in Israel found out) how do you structure it so you can spin it as a race/religion/ethny neutral regulation?

I wonder what effect if any this would have, or has had in Sweden, on wages and employment rate for men.

We face a similar problem in America. How do you make sure you fund the babies you WANT to have, and not subsidize The Other? Somalis living in America, for example, would gladly have 6, 8, 10 kids per mother.

Giving the benefits only to married couples and only while they're married. Even with those sort of incentives I don't imagine the poor, especially the EBT-addicted variety who spend their gubmit money at strip clubs and red lobster will be able to keep that up in large numbers.

An even better way would be to make the incentive in the form of huge tax cuts for each baby you have. Some gross Puerto Rican woman in the Bronx is not going to care about that since she already has no job and most likely has never had one. She's probably too stupid and unaware to even know such an incentive exists. She only knows she has a benefit card.

On the surface, Sweden appears to be a feminist paradise. Look at any global survey of gender equity and Sweden will be near the top. Family-friendly policies are its norm....

No wonder they seem puzzled. What do "family-friendly policies" have to do with feminism? Feminism has never been about making it easier for women to have babies; if anything it's the opposite. To the extent that feminists told women they could have it all -- motherhood and a career -- it was a ploy to get women out of the homes and into the offices. No real feminist is ever happy to see a woman raising her own child.

As far as Sweden goes, as either Sailer or Derb has put it: Sweden works because it's full of Swedes (or was until recently; it remains to be seen how their system will react to mass third-world immigration). Swedish-style cradle-to-grave welfare in the USA would likely result in many underclass women raising several welfare babies for every one career woman who drops out of the rat race to stay home with her 1-2.

"The reason they choose work over home life is because work pays better. So, the answer is obvious: provide financial incentives to get them on the Mommy track. It may seem unfair - actually, it is unfair - but fairness is a small price to pay for societal sustainability. "

I am assuming that the author was being sarcastic when he wrote this comment - or, at least, hope he was. Equality is just that: being equal to others. Not being superior or inferior. So, why should Swedish women be entitled to anything that thier male counterparts are not entitled to? Society is sustained when by people paying taxes and following laws. Laws work best when they apply to everyone equally. Laws that only apply to a select group within society (i.e. Men) eventually break society down since the offended party(ies) begin to distance themselves from the act or acts that cause the injustice (i.e. marriage and having children). Sound like the current state of the USA? All first-world nations will face this dilema and only the smart ones will come through it in a productive fashion.

If we want economic justice for all, we must first give economic justice for all. Stop punishing men and rewarding women!

The problem comes from lower status and/or lower income betas who get taxed so badly to pay for this that their only real method of having a family - exchanging their excess labor for female reproduction - is taken from them. A non-trivial percentage of Swedish women enter soft harems and leave those betas without sex but paying for the tab. Fortunately for them, they are actually quite high status and high income by world standards and can move to other countries to find wives.

http://www.thailovelines.com/Frontinfo/thai-women-sweden.html

I don't deny that game works, but it can't save everyone in a place like Sweden where female hypergamy rules everything without exporting excess men/importing women. Other countries do not have that option since quite bluntly their men are just not as desirable.

I think this is a strawman version of feminism. A real feminist is perfectly happy if a woman raises her child--and the company she left to do so must then take her back and give her all the career advancement she'd have had if she'd stayed.

I'm not so sure about that. One of the foundational goals of feminism is the destruction of the nuclear family. For example, feminist author and teacher Vivian Gornick said:

"Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that."

No. As Sunshine Mary pointed out, their own words make that clear. Sure, if a woman has a child, they'll use that to advance their agenda as best they can; but they'll do their best to push her into not raising the child herself.

The difference between Sweden and the USA seems to be that Sweden's laws in this area are more straightforwardly socialist -- a safety net for all funded with high taxes -- while the USA's have been driven by feminism -- advancing women in careers at the expense of men and children.

Well, that is pretty much already in play. Female "engineers" are usually shoved into management to get them the fuck away from anything dangerous, demanding, or necessary. I still don't like that answer, but there is reality, at this point, to deal with.

All you will achieve by that is to increase single motherhood. The best you can hope for with incentives is that a mother will marry before spawning, and then kick the man out of the house saying "see? Im innocent!"

No, the only option is to take away all government incentives, and all government quotas. Also reform family court law so it is contractual, not whimsical (based on the whims of the white knit judge). D this, and women will quickly rediscover marriage, motherhood, etc.

But we both know very well there is zero chance of that happening as long as women have the vote.

I wonder why women, who do one thing and say another twelve thousand times a day, are so interested in hearing verbal validation from men? They don't tell the truth, but somehow everything that men say is gospel. Bizarre.

As sunlight Mary pointed out, their own comments to make clear rules. And, of course, if a woman have a child, they would use their agenda, try our best to promote them, but they will try to push her to not raise a child.